Soares logs miles to West African drug conference

Albany County District Attorney David Soares is in his native Cape Verde off the coast of West Africa this week as a keynote speaker at a drug policy conference sponsored by island nation’s ministry of justice and a nonprofit that describes itself as promoting “integrated development.”

(Note: The website is largely in Portuguese, so this post is largely brought to you by Google Translate.)

Soares, who was born on the Cape Verdean island of Brava and later grew up in Rhode Island, is scheduled to speak for 10 minutes Thursday ahead of a session on lessons learned from African health and drug policies. (Also note: The website appears to refer to Soares as “Rev. Dr. David Smith,” but again, that could just be a translation hiccup.)

In addition to the Cape Verdean government, the drug policy confab is sponsored by the nonprofit Agencia Piaget Para o Desenvolvimento.

While on the other side of the Atlantic, Soares will also attend all of the roundtable discussions and other conference sessions in addition to touring law enforcement offices in the country over the course of the week, said his spokeswoman, Cecilia Logue.

Logue said the trip is being sponsored entirely by the Agencia Piaget Para o Desenvolvimento and noted Soares has attended international drug conferences in the past — most notably one in Vancouver in 2006 where his comments about the U.S. war on drugs ignited a firestorm of criticism among some in local law enforcement circles.

The conference’s stated aim is to create “a space for reflection, analyzing the state of the art of current drug policy, and the impact they have generated in the fields of health, social justice and the economy” in Portuguese-speaking African countries.

According tothe conference website, the gathering is being funded by Open Society Foundations, an organization founded by billionaire liberal cause bankroller George Soros. Soros is also a backer of the Drug Policy Alliance,which supported Soares’ 2004 upset primary victoryfueledin part by the then-little-known prosecutor’s pledge to push for reforms to New York’s stringent Rockefeller Drug Laws.

Other speakers at the two-day conference include representatives of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Cape Verde Prime Minister Jose Maria Neves and high-level governmental officials from Angola and Mozambique, among others.

Walsh said Soares has taken an interest aiding law enforcement in his native country, noting that in October the three-term Democrat hosted a contingent of judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers from Cape Verde who were in the U.S. on a trip sponsored by the United Nations and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Adaministration. Soares’ attendance at the conference is an extension of those efforts, Walsh said.